My name is Rob Chavez. I am a social neuroscientist and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. My research uses a combination of multimodal neuroimaging and statistical learning methods to describe how regions of the brain work together to represent information about ourselves, other people, and the ways in which people differ from one another. As such, my work broadly draws on theoretical and methodological approaches from cognitive neuroscience, personality psychology, evolutionary theory, and data science.

My recent work has focused on the structure and function of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and its connectivity to other brain systems. The MPFC has been implicated in myriad cognitive and affective processes, from memory and reward to social cognition and self-representation. However, the details of how this large, complex brain region encodes and integrates information to give rise to these processes remain poorly understood. My research aims to shed light on these issues.